Often when people are talking about being normal they are referring to their Mental Health.
There are a number of different models of mental health:

• As Above Normal
• As Positive Psychology
• As Subjective Well-Being
• As Maturity
• As Social-Emotional Intelligence
• As Resilience

You and You alone are responsible for the quality of your life.

Being successful at anything in life means you have to take 100% responsibility for all your experiences. Everything!

Not an easy task since we have spent most of our lives learning to blame something or someone else.

The questions to ask are:

Am I 100% responsible for my life?
Have I ever blamed anyone for the circumstances in my life?
Have I ever complained about anything?

Taking 100% responsibility means understanding that you are the cause of all your experiences.

This means giving up all blaming and complaining. All results both positive and negative in your life are your responsibility.

“Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.”
Wayne Dyer

So while we will be looking at many strategies for developing and reaching the life you want, you have to practice and apply the techniques. Put in the effort and reap the rewards.

To make changes in your lifemeans overcoming the inertia created by years of conditioning to do just what you are doing now. You will wonder why it is not working or working faster, when will I achieve my goal?  Success in any form takes time, effort, practice and patience. Keep at it, then keep at it some more and then keep going. Sometimes being on a plateau occurs. This is normal.

Dont give up at this point. Keep at it and you will reach a higher level of proficiency.

Have a great day

Nevin

To feel happy and be worthwhile I must achieve, succeed at what ever I do, and make no mistakes.

What’s wrong with aiming for perfection you may ask. There is nothing wrong with aiming for perfection, but insisting on it is irrational. No one is perfect, nor will we ever be. If you are constantly setting unobtainable high goals, you are only setting yourself up for failure and disappointment when you don’t reach that goal, despite the fact that you may in fact have achieved quite significantly. And setting up perfectionism as a goal actually makes it harder to achieve as end up you placing a lot of pressure on yourself which creates anxiety, thereby reducing your performance. It is more rational to set realistic goals, understand that you will make mistakes (because every body does) and learn from those mistake for the future.

A healthier idea

I want to do some things well most of the time. Like everybody, I will occasionally fail or make a mistake, then I will feel disappointed, but I can cope with that, and I can take constructive steps to do better next time.

Outdoor development provides opportunities for finding and developing our strengths through predominantly outdoor activities.

It is outcomes-led, planned for systematically and almost invariably team-based.

It has distinct advantages for team-building and other development exercises over more traditional classroom-based activities.

Participants get fully involved, with feelings and emotions being as important as intellectual and physical activity. Despite the hype, the emphasis is not upon physical endurance, strength or commando-like skills. Participants tend to learn most from exercises that are not physically challenging. The impact is long-lasting. People who have outdoor development experiences rarely forget them.

Attitudes

Attitudes are like beliefs, with the addition of an emotional component. This component inclines us to respond either positively or negatively to the subject of the attitude. A positive attitude is closely associated with a general belief in our capacity for self-improvement and achievement.

Attitudes are essential and unavoidable. Without them we should have to respond to people, events and messages on a moment-to-moment basis, and decide each time we encountered them how we felt and thought about them. But the specific attitudes we have, their direction (favourable or unfavourable), salience (how important they are for us) and intellsity (how strongly we hold them) can have a very significant influence upon our capacity for development.

In general, we are more likely to reinforce our attitudes than to change them. This is especially the case with attitudes closely tied to our self-image and with generalized attitudes. Changing a generalized attitude (eg, one towards a religious faith or political party) inevitably entails a host of changes to the specific attitudes which relate to it.

Our own personal development requires a reevaluation of certain attitudes – a shift towards those consistent with our goals and aspirations and away from those which block their accomplishment. For example, if we have been raised with a negative attitude towards the rich, then we are unlikely to achieve wealth-related goals until we have altered our attitude. Particularly crucial here are our attitudes towards change itself. Your success in achieving change will be influenced by the attitude, or state of mind, with which you approach any given task, and by the existence of “self-defeating beliefs” which can block you from achieving change.

Personal growth also involves an alignment of positive attitudes and behaviour: for example, actually setting goals, not just having a positive view about it.

Maintaining the ‘right’ attitudes involves actively seeking out of like-minded people and information conducive to our attitudes. For example immersing yourself by using self-improvement tapes, books and speakers helps ensure exposure to messages in line with your attitudes. Similarly, the avoidance of newspapers and anything else which might have a negative influence adds to maintaining a positive attitude.

Success experts emphasize the attitude component of achievement. So what is the link between internal attitude and external achievement? Part of the explanation seems to be that if we have a positive attitude (almost certainly linked to high self-esteem) we will be more open to ideas and solutions, and will go on looking for them longer than someone with a negative attitude. In this sense success relates to being a happy extraverted person who will reap the benefits of the behaviours correlated with Happiness.

If we approach a situation (a job interview, for instance) with positive expectations, thinking it is going to go well, then these expectations give rise to positive attitudes towards the situation, the people in it and ourselves. In turn, we translate these attitudes into the kinds of verbal and non-verbal behaviours such as smiling, making good eye contact, being complimentary which encourages other people to be receptive and positive towards us. Hence, we get the outcome we wanted. We nkow that these behaviours are associated with being happy. See Success and happiness.

Today we continue with the concept of states.

We create our states through our perceptions and memories, we can change them through our behaviours.

Try the exercises below.

Creating States

We create states by the way we perceive the external events in the world.

We vary in the way we perceive, interpret and react to different events and that makes a difference to which state we end up in. Some of us get upset by very small events while others cope with disasters as if they were nothing.

Changing States

Being able to manage a state is important because if you are in the right state for a situation then you are more likely to achieve your outcomes.

Some of us use drugs, alcohol, sex, food, shopping to change our states. They are short term solutions and can have disastrous consequences.

The best way to alter states is to change the way you think about things.

Try this

Think of a memory where you are mildly uncomfortable say 3 or 4 on a 1-10 scale. (10 is the most uncomfortable)

Associate into it, feel it in your body, now hold onto this feeling while you jog on the spot or hop around on one foot. Most people find this hard to keep the uncomfortable feeling. (You may also try the Seagull and Jackhammer exercise)

Now break the state by counting slowly up to 10.

Now think of a calm place, a place where you are happy, where there is nothing going on. You may use the place from the guided visualisations. Now try to hold on to the calm feeling while you increase your breathing rate and bring your breath high into your chest.

Break state.

This is also known as exaggerating the mistake and shows that you do have control over your states and how quick and easy it is to change them.

Remember that many emotions especially negative ones are signals to action, that something in your life needs attention, there is a positive intent behind them. Once we experience the emotion, understand it then we can take action on it.

Elicitation

This is a technique for helping some one else move from one state to another.

The easiest way is to get them to recall a time when they felt the way they want to feel in a specific situation. For example if you need to feel confident then remember a time you did feel confident and associate to it now.

Remember a time when you felt relaxed and fully associate to it. When working with someone it helps if you model that state yourself.

Have fun and see you next time

Nevin

Neurological Levels

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

                                                             Henry David Thoreau

We often think about things on “different Levels”. Robert Dilts has developed a model for personal change, learning and communication that considers the ideas of context, levels of learning and perceptual position. It provides a framework for organising and gathering information, so you can identify the best point to intervene to make any desired change.

This is based on systems theory where there are natural hierarchies or levels of experience. The information in each level is organised and controlled by the one above it. By changing something on an upper level, changes are effected on the lower levels. Changing something at a lower level could, but not necessarily, affect the upper levels.

Dilts’ model looks at the relations and influences of the different parts of our selves and environment.

The following levels seem to be important to consider:

Spiritual:

“Spiritual” factors come from our perception of being a part of larger and larger systems surrounding us.

Related to anything else?

Vision and Purpose:

Why you are who you are, what you are here for. How you can be fulfilled? Is there more involved than the obvious?

Your contribution to society.

Identity:

This answers the question: who am I?
Identity gives you a basic sense of self and expression of core values. Identity has primarily to do with mission. It is the deepest (or highest) level.

Our identity determines our overall vision or purpose (mission).

Mission:

Your mission is a statement of what it is that you do.

Belief Systems:

This level has to do with the values and beliefs of the individual. It answers the question: why am I doing this?

Beliefs and values are the various ideas we think are true and use as a basis for daily action. Beliefs can be both permissive and limiting.

Values:

Things we see as important to ourselves.

Permission & motivation:

Our beliefs and values provide the reinforcement that supports or denies our capabilities (motivation and permission).

Capabilities:

Our capabilities are the groups or sets of behaviours, general skills and strategies that we can use in our life. We use them to guide and give direction to behavioural actions through mental maps, Models path or strategies that generates more specific behaviours.

Direction & Choice:

What visions, missions and goals we decide on and what maps, models and strategies we choose to achieve these.

Specific Behaviors:

Behaviour is made up of the specific actions or reactions taken within our daily environment.
Regardless of our capabilities, behaviour describes what we actually do. It answers the question: what am I doing?

The Environment:

Environmental factors determine the external ‘givens’ we have to react to.

This has to do with the external context in which behaviour occurs and answers the question: when and where does this behaviour occur?  The environment to some degree determines the Opportunities available to us and the & Constraints imposed on us.

Exercise: Link to Word Document Neurological Level Worksheet.